by Ruthie Knox
So many errors in judgment attached to the same crooked smile. The same pair of hands. The same tall, lean, hard body.
When Carson came to Potter Falls, he just sort of … happened to her.
She would drop by to see Glory, only to discover he’d turned up unannounced for a visit, and her heart would stop at the sight of him sipping coffee at his mother’s kitchen table.
She would come out of the library and walk into him on his way up the steps, and he would wrap one arm around her to steady her as she tumbled into the past with a lurch of nostalgic lust.
His first time home after college, back when he was in the Army Corps of Engineers, he’d taken her to the movies, and she’d learned that it was possible to suffocate from yearning.
Julie had never been able to resist him—had in fact only quit sleeping with him because he’d stopped trying to get her to. Which was both a profound relief and a terrible blow to her pride.
“We’re acquaintances,” she said. A little more sharply than she meant to. “Old acquaintances. At best.”
The lip quirk turned into a grin, and she felt a flush creeping up her throat and into her cheeks. He was standing too close, smiling too warm. It pinged down through her, a little sonar burst of sexual homecoming. If he kissed her hello, his lips would still be cool even though his hands were hot. His hands were always hot.
And he always did this to her. One minute in his presence, and she was thinking about kissing him. Five minutes, and her mind’s eye would be screwing him on the kitchen table. Within an hour, she’d be spinning impossible fantasies again.
In a week, he would be gone.
She brushed past him to the check-in desk and fiddled with the guest book, flipping back through the pages as if she were looking for some essential bit of information she’d lost track of.
Such as what had happened to all her goddamn poise.
“I still work at the library part-time,” she said to the book.
She’d clocked forty-hour weeks for a decade before she had enough money saved up to buy the house, then spent three years fixing it up on evenings and weekends. She’d had it open for another three, and she loved everything about it. She loved cooking breakfast for paying customers and helping them discover the beautiful corner of the world she called home. She loved decorating for Christmas and volunteering at the hospital and keeping the Chamber of Commerce on its toes.
She loved living in Potter Falls.
She did not love Carson Vance. Not anymore. Not since he’d made it clear that her home was his prison.
Learn your lesson. Grow up.
Julie flipped the book shut. “Right now, I’m closed.”
Carson stuck his hands in his coat pockets and watched her. Three beats. Four. Five.
“All right,” he said. “But if I’m going to walk back over to my dad’s, you think you could fortify me with a cup of coffee? Whatever you’ve got back in the kitchen smells good.”
“It’s dark roast. Ethiopian.”
“Perfect.”
She wanted to say no, it would not be perfect. He would not be permitted in her kitchen. She didn’t want to see him in there later, a ghost presence lingering and messing with her sanctuary.
Unfortunately, she’d spent too many years as one of his mother’s closest friends to deny Glory’s son a cup of coffee on such a cold day.
“Come on, then.”
She turned around and walked ahead of him, telling herself, This is how it’s going to be this time. You’re the one who walks away.
But she could feel his eyes on her all the way down the hall, and she kept waiting for his hands to land on her hips. To push her against the wall. To sneak inside her shirt, flatten over her stomach, roam over her breasts, and make her crazy.
She couldn’t let him stay.
She would never survive it.
Chapter Three
Someone had set off a powder bomb in the kitchen.
“Whoa,” Carson said.
Julie’s appearance had warned him she was doing some home-improvement work, but he hadn’t been prepared for this kind of mess. A ladder stood in the center of the room, rags and buckets littered the floor, and every surface was coated with white dust and flakes of paint.
“What are you up to in here?”
“I’m cleaning the ceiling with baking soda.”
“Are you just flinging it up there and hoping it’ll stick?”
“No, Carson.” She spoke to him like a schoolteacher might lecture an unruly eight-year-old. “I made a paste, and I’m scrubbing it into the cracks with a toothbrush.”
“Is it working?”
“Not really.”
He set his hands on his hips and considered the ceiling. Better than staring at Julie. She’d grown her wheat-colored hair out long and covered it up with an ugly bandana, but other than that, she was just how he remembered her.
Dangerous.
“What’s under all that paint?”
“Tin.” As she said it, he saw the answer for himself—one area that she’d managed to get cleaned off enough so he could spot the dull gray beneath. A single square foot surrounded by 199 more that were still coated in a century’s worth of blistering paint. Plus baking-soda paste.
“Pain in the ass of a job.”
“It’s going to be beautiful.”
“Yeah, but it’ll take you a few months, at least.”
She frowned. “I have a few weeks. I’m going to be full for Christmas, so it has to be done by then.”
“You’re off your rocker if you think you can do this in a couple weeks.”
He checked himself. It was a terrible habit, baiting Julie. He needed to knock it off.
She always messed him up this way, turning him into a version of himself even he couldn’t like. Not that she purposely transformed him into a giant walking penis when he got in her vicinity. It wasn’t her fault at all. It was just their past. More than that, it was her. He got edgy and turned on and irritable around Julie, and he always ended up doing the wrong thing. Arguing with her. Putting his hands on her just to feel that soft skin and all the heat they created. Getting lost in her body and the sound and smell of her.
Part of it was how much he hated the way she treated him now—just like when they had met at Alfred University. Three hundred miles northwest of Manhattan, well up in the boonies, and yet she’d been so snooty, a real-life New York City rich girl sitting next to him in class. He’d burned to know if she was like that all the way through to her bones, or if it was just an act. When he finally did get her talking to him, they’d bickered. A lot. Half the time, he’d picked fights with her purely for the pleasure of watching her eyes brighten and her skin flush.
It turned out she was like that in bed, too. The contrast drove him crazy. For most of college, he split his time between studying and debauching Julie. Messing up her hair. Feeling her frantic fingers at his fly. Sinking into her while she moaned in his ear and whispered words no blushing virgin should have known. Words he’d taught her for the sheer pleasure of listening to them spill from her mouth as he thrust inside her.
Carson shook his head to clear it. Jesus. He’d just gotten here, and she was already frowning at him in that superior way she had, and he was already dying to fuck her.
Julie ignored his taunt and busied herself with pouring him a cup of coffee.
“Do you still take cream and sugar?”
“Just cream.”
She cleaned off a spot on the counter, set the mug and a container of half-and-half on it, and wiped off a barstool for him to sit on.
“Thank you.”
He felt strange, perched on the stool. Out of place in this domestic space that had so much of her in it. Deep cobalt tiles behind the countertops and orange hand towels. A red stand mixer. Pictures on the fridge of people he didn’t know, and one snapshot of his parents, laughing. He looked at her ceiling again, just to have somewhere to look.
Oven cleaner would take the
paint off, but Carson didn’t tell her. He didn’t like the idea of Julie on a ladder, spraying caustic chemicals at the ceiling.
“Can’t you afford to hire someone else to do it?”
Another personal question. He was no good at playing by the rules she set.
But all she said was, “Sure.”
She wore an ancient denim shirt with the sleeves rolled up, men’s canvas pants, and old running shoes. Her eyes were the same blue he spotted in odd places. A field of wildflowers in Afghanistan. The claws of a crab in the Indies. A brightly dyed dress in a North African marketplace.
Never on another woman, though. Only Julie had eyes that color—almost purple.
Only Julie ever looked at him so cold. Downright icy.
He should go before he got both of them into something they’d regret. But he needed the bed.
He tried another tack. “When was the last time you were in my dad’s house?”
“Right before I heard you were back in town.”
She’d been avoiding him. He’d suspected as much, but he still didn’t like hearing it.
“Have you seen upstairs lately?”
“I saw.”
“I can’t keep sleeping on the couch.”
“Why not? I thought that was your thing.”
“You thought what was my thing?”
She made a vague, looping gesture with one hand. “Carson Vance, world explorer. I thought you slept in the dirt most nights.”
“I’m thirty-six. I’m too old to sleep in the dirt. Ten days on the couch, and my back is killing me.”
She pursed her lips, then gave him an emotionless smile. “The Canal Inn over in Fenimore has Tempurpedic mattresses now. I can get you a discount.”
“It’s twenty miles to Fenimore, and it’s gonna snow tonight.”
“You’re an excellent snow driver.”
“Come on, Jules. I don’t even have a car here.” He reached out for her arm, but that was a mistake. She backed around to the other side of the counter, her smile turning wary.
“I’m too busy to have a guest,” she said.
“So don’t treat me like a guest. Just give me a bed and ignore me.”
Julie crossed her arms. “It’s not a good idea.”
No use denying that he knew what she meant. Not when his eyes had homed in on the top button of her shirt as soon as her innocently crossed arms plumped up her breasts and yanked his attention downward.
Creamy skin and a hint of lace. God help him, he wanted to ask her if she was seeing anybody. It used to be the first thing he asked when he came to town. Sometimes she was, and he cut his visits short because he couldn’t stand seething over Julie’s sex life any more than he could stand spending more than a couple days at a time in Potter Falls.
Other times she wasn’t, and they got caught up together at the wrong moments for the wrong reasons. In back rooms, broom closets, hallways. One memorable occasion behind the woodpile.
Always stupid and impulsive, and always he regretted it, because afterward he had to watch her pull herself together and put that distant, untouchable look back on her face, like a blanket she drew over her shoulders.
He’d stopped allowing himself “accidents” with Julie years ago, when his mother had not-so-delicately implied that he was stringing her along, and she needed to get on with her life.
She’d gotten engaged a year or so later, but the wedding never happened. His mom would say only that it hadn’t worked out.
“I’ll keep out of your hair,” Carson said, putting all his control into keeping his voice low and persuasive. It was the tone he relied on to talk Foreign Service contractors into working overtime for regular pay. It worked on everybody.
“You won’t have to wash my towels or sheets or cook me breakfast,” he added. “Hell, you can put me to work. I’ll strip the ceiling for you.” If his father wasn’t going to let him clear out the upstairs room, Carson needed to rustle up another form of distraction anyway.
Her frown deepened.
“Julia,” he said, because she hated being called that, and he wanted to put a crack in her frozen expression.
Her eyes flared to life. His cock pulsed and grew heavy. Just like that.
But she didn’t respond except to say, “Carson.”
He gave up and pushed the one button he knew would work. “You know what’s going on with my dad. I need to stay here. I need your help.”
She turned her back on him and looked out the window over the sink. Her shoulders dropped. “You can have a spare room in the attic.”
“Wonderful.”
“It’s nothing fancy. I’m not giving you one of the good rooms because I have to get them all aired out and decorated. You’ll just be in my way.”
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. The room comes with breakfast, and I’m charging you 120 a night.”
“Fine.”
“And you have to be out by December 21. I’m booked for the holidays, and I don’t want you hanging around being all …”
“Charming?”
The frown again. He hated that frown.
“Sexy?”
It turned into a scowl.
“Irresistible?”
“Annoying.” She considered him for a moment, head cocked. “You don’t even plan to stay that long, do you?”
“No.”
He wasn’t going to intend about it one way or the other. He’d take the three weeks she gave him, work on her ceiling, visit his dad every day, and play the cards he got dealt.
Julie did something with her lips, a form of wordless disapproval. It took him a second to recognize it as an expression out of his mother’s arsenal.
Julie and Glory had spent fifteen years learning each other’s mannerisms. They’d grown close that first summer, when Carson brought Julie to Potter Falls—the summer his mother was finally giving in to diabetic renal failure and he’d dragged Julie home to help shore him up against the inevitable.
“That’s my mom’s face,” he said.
Her eyes widened, then brightened with a sudden grief that flooded him.
Stunned, he looked down at the countertop.
There was the honest reaction he’d wanted, slicing through all the awkward pretending they were doing and surprising them both.
Julie got a cloth from a drawer, wet it, and began wiping down the area around the sink. “If I have to put up with you,” she said lightly, “I might as well start channeling your mother.”
There was the old Julie.
And now Carson felt hollow and dark, unfit for company. It wasn’t his mother—he thought he’d about done all his grieving for her already. Her death hadn’t been a surprise.
No, he just got this way in Potter Falls. A physical unease built up in him, a harried bleakness, until he had to leave because … well, he didn’t know because why. Because it would get worse if he didn’t.
Ten days was longer than he’d stayed in a very long time.
Julie blustered around the kitchen, turning on a burner beneath a small saucepan full of water, cinnamon sticks, and orange peel. She’d gotten that from his mother, too.
A weird thought. A weird situation. But then, life was often that way—full of improbable occurrences and awkward human attachments. A girlfriend who donated a kidney to her boyfriend’s mother, then moved into his childhood home and released him to carry on with his life. A father who filled his house with trash to lure home the prodigal son.
Tricky business, navigating the minefield of his past.
Carson sipped the coffee experimentally. Delicious. He took a deeper swallow, savoring the heat that spread down his throat and fanned across his chest to settle in his belly. Julie swiped at another countertop, small and tidy as a sparrow in her baking-soda-spattered pants and sneakers. He caught himself staring at her ass and looked away, out the far window, down toward the frozen pond.
A cold, unwelcoming view. But even wrecked, Julie’s kitchen was warm
, and it smelled like home.
“Thanks for taking me in.”
“I’m pretending you’re the Virgin Mary.”
He blinked. She picked a bucket up off the floor.
“Bad weather? Room at the inn? Mary having a baby in the stable—any of this ring a bell?”
The comparison amused him, lightening the atmosphere. When she tried to hustle past him a second later to dump the water in the sink, he had to work to keep from flattening his hand over her stomach and holding her in place, just to look at her.
“Honey, I’m not the virgin anything.”
Her eyes dropped. “Don’t start that.”
It definitely wasn’t only him.
But he wouldn’t do anything about it. Julie was a trap. Worse, she was his father’s trap.
Carson wasn’t getting caught.
Chapter Four
Bruce smiled when Carson walked through the door of the hardware store. “Nephew!”
“Uncle!” he shouted. The customary reply. They’d been doing it since Dad started bringing him to the store, probably around the time Carson was weaned.
If poker was his common ground with his father, home improvement was their battlefield. Weekends and evenings, Dad had always been dragging him along to paint rental units or help him sand and refinish cabinets and floors. If Bruce or Martin had work to do—and they always had work to do—Carson had been expected to tag along and help out.
“How’d that oven cleaner work out?” Bruce asked.
A big, burly man in his late seventies, he was six years older than Carson’s father and considerably easier to get along with. He’d opened the Potter Falls hardware store–slash–mercantile right after he came home from the Korean War.
“It’s working. I need a bunch more, though.”
“That’s a big kitchen your Julie’s got.”
She’s not my Julie. But he didn’t bother correcting Bruce. Everyone in town did it, had always done it, would always do it. Carson had brought her to Potter Falls, so as long as they both remained single, Potter Falls mentally coupled them up.
Hell, he’d been mentally coupling them up himself. In any number of different positions.
